June 30, 2008

Dying Ted Kennedy, the tabloids have it, has been calling his ex-Joan to make amends. His sin? In his eyes he "made" her an alcoholic through his womanizing. My advice? Do a lot more soul-searching, Ted. Your sins seem lots more global - like depraved indifference and deliberate cruelty - than simple shirt-chasing. In addition, no one "makes" anyone an alcoholic, not even a Kennedy can do that.

June 29, 2008

I made it through these two years after my dog Molly Mittens died. No one could have told me that I would somehow survive. And that's what we do, isn't it. We don't make peace with the idea of a pet's death. We don't look for meaning or message.

I have no idea what they teach in college these days but it must not include game theory. Otherwise, the 48 percent of the newbie graduates who, reports Monster TRAK, are heading home wouldn't be. They would have great jobs or have already passed the startup phase of the businesses they launched in their dorms or rundown apartments near campus. My hunch is that it was game theory, which was the rage when Rupert Murdoch was matriculating at Oxford, that turned this raw mass of rebellion and protoplasm into a guy who sure knows how to make a buck and bounce back beautifully from profesional setbacks.

June 27, 2008

It could just be that outlying affluent communities with their McMansions - like Darien, Connecticut - could become slums. That's right: Slums. Given the escalating cost of transportation fuel and energy for heating and cooling, those places which house families of the men, and increasingly the women, who journey into the city for high-paying jobs could become land and buildings no one wants to pay for any more. Like those scenes from the Russian Revolution, the riff-raff could be taking over the McMansions.

June 26, 2008

Four years ago this month, it was in the HARTFORD COURANT that my "comeback" "piece on pet grief was published. What came back was my professional self-confidence. And it was several months earlier that one of its reporters Sue Campbell did a feature on how my once wildly successful communications boutique had tanked. She pleaded for homes for animals I could no longer afford. That was then. The now is good, at least for me. I have a new business. It is earning plenty. And I did the work on my "inner technology," as one spiritual adviser called it, to hopefully prevent another implosion. With me live three cats who were abandoned.

June 25, 2008

It starts at Harvard and elite joints like it: The mindset of entitlement, faith in knowledge learned, and a default against failure. I know. I attended Harvard Law School. Had I stayed I never would have been able to put together the number of new careers I have had to in order to make a good living in a global technology-driven economy. Seemingly everything Harvard touches, from people to publications like THE HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW, it might risk ruining.

"Ivy League Slaves in New York" reads the headline in THE NEW YORK OBSERVER. The article, no newsflash, is about the usual schlep of these to glam media jobs in Manhattan. What's unusual and puzzling is that they're making these sacrifices of high rent, low-status/paying jobs in a dying industry. Most of Manhattan and other traditional media capitals are in a bunker mode, hoping the threat of new-media will pass.

June 24, 2008

In the July 9th THE NEW REPUBLIC article "External Flame: Why Caroline Kennedy needs Obama," Michelle Cottle classifies Sweet Caroline as "an unqualified and twitty political dilettante." But that's fairly irrelevant, isn't it, to getting and keeping power. There are plenty of political lightweights such as Huffington who do well for themselves in the arena of influence. What is relevant is Barack Obama's ability to create a whole new zeitgeist. Clearly, the old Camelot model would only be a distraction.